Acceso usuarios
Eva-Maria Landmesser
This article analyses three central works by Christoph Menke and situates the development of the idea of counter-rights in his oeuvre. The basic assumption in Law and Violence from 2011 is that violence is essential and fateful for law. To remedy this, Menke designed an Entsetzung of law as presented in this text. The idea that equality is not already guaranteed by the existence of equal rights is central to the 2015 monograph Critique of Rights. Instead, Menke argues that it is the conception of counter-rights that ensures true equality. A third text, Reflections of Equality from 2004, is used in this article to bridge these two positions. Based on the understanding derived from his Reflections, it is possible to weaken the potential for the violence of law and to solve the problem of equality by overcoming the tension between equal consideration of all and individual justice using counter-law. Thus, this article demonstrates that the conception of counter-rights is a further developed technique of Entsetzung. It is no longer Entsetzung of the law but Entsetzung of the form of rights. In the synopsis, it then becomes clear that Entsetzung, once it is developed further, contains an emancipatory moment. Finally, the disposition over the form of rights makes modern law more egalitarian, especially when the perspectives of law and morality collide.
